Models equipped with Huawei's Hongmeng vehicle and machine system: Q&I M5 released.
Author | Jelly Ping
Edit | Wen Liang
Huawei may have broken a history of the global auto industry yesterday: technology suppliers helped OEMs release a new model on the supplier's platform, the AITO Q&I M5.
As the first model equipped with Huawei's Hongmeng car machine system, the Q&I M5 was unveiled at Huawei's home winter flagship new product launch yesterday.
At the end of the press conference, Yu Chengdong, managing director of Huawei and CEO of smart car solution BU, specially spent a lot of time to provide a high-profile introduction for the M5:
"Huawei has done every core component of the car, we only do the parts, not the car, we will help the car companies to build a good car." Not only to build a good car, but also to sell a good car. ”
Xilis, which has the AITO brand, is incognito at the press conference.
After watching this conference, many people in the industry have said, "Huawei, which promised not to build cars, has been frantically testing the edge of car building." ”
Blurred Boundaries: How Deep Is Huawei's Involvement in the Boundary M5?
The biggest highlight and selling point of the M5 is undoubtedly that it is the first model equipped with the "HarmonyOS Smart Cockpit".
Specifically, the M5 is equipped with Huawei's application market specially built for smart in-vehicle scenes, and has been pre-installed with applications such as petal maps, music, videos, kugou, himalaya, pocket story, Youku, and Thunderstone.
In terms of voice car control, the Hongmeng car machine system can achieve up to 60 seconds of continuous dialogue, not afraid of interjection interruption and invalid instructions, can achieve a sentence to arrange 2 tasks, and can also identify instructions from the main driver, co-driver, and rear row.
More importantly, it is the linkage of the M5 Hongmeng car machine system and the mobile phone system, after all, being able to smoothly cover the car, mobile phone and other IOT at the same time is the biggest expectation of Huawei itself and the outside world for the "Hongmeng system".
According to Huawei, the Hongmeng car machine system on the M5 can use the same Huawei account to log in to the mobile phone and the car machine at the same time, and under the distributed technical support of HarmonyOS, it can realize the connection between the mobile phone and the car with services such as navigation, music, video, and changlian.
In addition, M5 can also be connected to the car watch, so that the watch does not feel unlock the vehicle, that is, the user can use HUAWEI WATCH3 to unlock the vehicle through Bluetooth or NFC, and can also view vehicle information, switch mode, lock the car, open and close the window and find the car through the owner APP on the mobile phone or watch.
This is Huawei's first model that is truly deeply involved, in addition to the above Hongmeng car machine system and HUAWEI DriveOne three-electric system, Huawei's tentacles have even reached the exterior interior design, performance configuration, audio, home charging pile and other corners of the vehicle.
"Except for the chassis, the wheels, the housing and the seats, the rest is Huawei technology" – Huawei may have actually done that.
However, industry insider Lidong told New Smart Drive that for technology companies, in terms of the software foundation, application software framework and overall service software in the car machine system, the technology of various companies in the industry is similar.
"Things like voice wake-up rate, imaging recognition rate, etc. are basically not much different, and now the competition is more about the company's grasp of the overall knowledge domain of the vehicle."
Why can Huawei be deeply involved?
Before cooperating with Huawei, the car brand "Xilis" may not be well-known.
Xinzhi Driving learned that Xilisi (also known as Jinkang Xilisi) is a new energy vehicle brand under Chongqing Xiaokang Co., Ltd.
Xiaokang co-stock founded SF Motors in Silicon Valley in the United States in 2016 and hired Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard as an automotive consultant.
After SF Motors encountered difficulties in the United States, Xiaokang shifted the focus of its new energy vehicle business back to China, and released its first SUV model, the Xilis SF5, at a price of 339,000 yuan in April 2019.
In July 2020, deliveries of the SF5 began. As of the end of 2020, only 1,051 units of the model have been sold.
From the perspective of financial data, due to the poor performance of the new energy vehicle business, Xiaokang shares' net profit fell by more than 80% in 2018, and it lost 884 million yuan and 1.729 billion yuan in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Behind the continuous losses, Xiaokang shares have not chosen to compromise.
In February 2019, they reached a comprehensive cooperation with Huawei, and the Huawei Xilis project was also established in the same month - the free expedition version of the Sf5 released by the two parties in January 2021 is equipped with Huawei's DriveONE electric drive system.
In April this year, at the Shanghai Auto Show, Xilix cooperated with Huawei to release the first Huawei Smart Select model, the Xilis Huawei Smart SF5, which is equipped with Huawei's DriveONE three-in-one electric drive system, HUAWEI HiCar, HUAWEI Sound, etc. (but excluding Huawei's autonomous driving technology).
Not only that, Huawei also participated in the design and quality control of this car. But more importantly, this model can also be sold in Huawei's terminal channels.
As a result, the Xilis Huawei Smart SF5 became the first model selected by Huawei and the first car sold by Huawei.
So, as the main model, why is the Xilis SF5 willing to cooperate with Huawei in such depth?
New Intelligent Driving learned that as a private enterprise, Xiaokang's R&D investment can only be maintained after its own models have been sold. However, after the release of the Group's first new energy model, the Xilis SF5 in 2019, it has not been successful in this era of wine and fear of deep alleys, and it can even be said to be very bleak.
Choosing to cooperate with Huawei in depth, with the help of Huawei's good brand voice and technical strength, it is also a reliable choice to open up a world in the field of new energy and achieve a win-win situation.
The price of cooperation may be to bet on the most important model and divide a part of the flash.
For Cyrus, this is basically a full-scale gamble.
In fact, two days after Cyrus Huawei's Smart SF5 officially entered the Huawei flagship store, orders for this model exceeded 3,000 units, almost three times the sales volume of Cyrus's self-operated channels in 2020.
Not only that, the cooperation with Huawei has also made the stock price of Xiaokang shares rise by four to five times in half a year.
According to the data of the Association, from April to October this year, the sales volume of the SF5 of Xilix (including all channels including Huawei stores) was 129 vehicles, 204 vehicles, 1097 vehicles, 507 vehicles, 715 vehicles, 1117 vehicles, and 1926 vehicles, respectively, although the overall sales volume was still not high, but maintained a general month-on-month growth trend.
Interestingly, after the release of the M5, the market appeared to have insufficient confidence in Xiaokang shares: at the opening of the next day, Xiaokang shares directly fell to a stop.
"Q&I M5 is a further test of Huawei's car, this time Xiaokang is basically the role of the OEM, this car from the shape, design, function, after the listing may be very loud, but the sales will not be very large, because Huawei is using the power of others to explore the path of car building." Industry insider Ke Subei said so to the new smart driver.
How long can Huawei's determination not to build cars last?
In addition to weak car companies such as Jinkang, there are actually not many large car companies that cooperate with Huawei, but the nature of cooperation between the latter is obviously different.
For large state-owned enterprises such as Changan, GAC, and BAIC, they have brand precipitation and sales base, and cooperation with Huawei is essentially to help huawei's advantages in intelligence, software, and autonomous driving technology to help their own transformation.
At the same time, the head car companies have always been vigilant about Huawei's car manufacturing, and the "soul theory" of SAIC Chairman Chen Hong has expressed the views and concerns of mainstream car companies.
"Huawei wants to put up a third-party automatic driving, SAIC is very difficult to accept, (can not accept) there is a company to provide me with an overall solution... At this time, it becomes (Huawei) is the soul, I am the body. This is unacceptable to us, and our soul must be in our own hands. ”
At present, the car companies that choose to hold their souls tightly still account for the majority.
For example, Changan, a new electric vehicle brand that is expected to launch next year, will adopt Huawei's Huawei Inside model, but this is only one of the routes for Changan Automobile to develop autonomous vehicles.
Ke Subei pointed out that Changan Automobile's development of autonomous driving mainly contains two lines: Avita uses Huawei's HI solution, and T3 Technology uses Changan's autonomous software.
"Regarding automatic driving, FAW, Second Automobile, and SAIC all walk on two legs, have a line of their own, and have a line of external cooperation, but they are not looking for Huawei."
Regarding whether to build a car, although Huawei has also hesitated internally before, at least huawei's statement has always been clear, "do not build a car, but help car companies build a good car."
However, throughout the development of huawei and other Internet manufacturers in the past, when they develop new businesses, they always lack a sense of boundaries and have strong expansion capabilities, and it is difficult for the outside world to take off their similar impression labels, so the intention and beautiful vision of "jointly building an automobile ecosystem" that they try to make car companies accept are now quite weak and unsolvable, a typical example is Baidu.
Chang Le, a senior rider with 5 years of pure electric driving experience, told the new intelligent driving that the first- and second-tier car companies that have the ability to develop themselves will develop their own car machine systems and automatic driving solutions, Huawei and Internet manufacturers will make cars, and Xiaokang Xilis is likely to establish a joint venture with Huawei in the future, or be acquired by Huawei.
Han Dong, co-founder/president of Zero Idea Technology, also pointed out to the new intelligent driving that Huawei now wants to output an overall solution, Huawei's one-stop service is suitable for lying flat car companies, and to maintain the "soul" of car companies, it is difficult to cooperate with Huawei in depth.
At present, if it goes well, Huawei wants to do a tier1 role like Bosch and Continental.
But Lidong believes that such a model is no longer feasible in the automotive industry, because even Bosch and the mainland are transforming. "Huawei itself is a system integration manufacturer, not a very innovative basic software supplier, in addition, compared to the traditional OEMs and new car-making forces, Huawei's understanding of cars is weak, so he wants to do tier1 to enter the automotive supply chain, the advantage is not great."
Therefore, the dilemma facing Huawei is that whether it is the HI (Huawei Inside) model or only software-level cooperation, if Huawei cooperates with weak car companies, sales and voice volume are destined not to be high, so it is impossible to obtain broader and deeper data and feedback, so as to verify its own technology.
But on the other hand, large car companies are not willing to be deeply bundled together, staying at the level of strategic cooperation, and cannot really commercialize technology. In this way, it seems that huawei only has one way to build its own car.
"Intel has only built CPUs in its lifetime, which is a very strong determination; it can restrain almost all supervisors and employees to express their attitudes on business, and the strategy is basically the same, which is decades of management accumulation." The first point Huawei obviously does not have, and the second point Huawei has to evolve for at least 15 years. Changle thinks so.
Chen Xiang, another industry insider, pointed out to the new intelligent driving that there is no need to worry about Huawei, and the current Huawei is just testing the waters in the automobile industry and saving experience.
Chen Xiang believes that at present, for Huawei, it is the same whether it is the same as making cars, because Huawei wants to make money in the automotive industry chain, whether it is choosing to make cars or only as a supplier, it is only a kind of business model, and the most important thing is whether it can land in technology and make money, "It is still early, and the final result will not be seen until at least 2025."
Perhaps, Huawei is also borrowing the "asking boundary" to ask where the boundaries of its car construction are.
(Changle, Lidong, Kesubei, Chen Xiang are pseudonyms)
END
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